Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of syntactic parsing processes on relative-clause sentence comprehension process by using the self-paced word-by-word reading task. In Experiment I. left-branching sentence (SOV/SS) which can be processed by left-to-right parsing strategy and parallel processing strategy was found to be read faster than center-embedded sentence (OSV/SO) only after third word-phrase. In Experiment II. the co-referent argument of OSV/SS which can be processed by parallel processing strategy was found to be read faster than that of OSV/SO. These results show that left-to-right and parallel processing strategies are used in on-line comprehension processing. They were interpreted as showing that working-memory load was central to left-to- right processing and that the unconsistent double parsing was critical to parallel processing strategy.